A boy with nothing
Most Japanese priests of the Christian Century were trained by the Jesuits in Japan. Thomas Araki was not. He was of humble birth, and his mother supported herself by the work of her own hands.The historian Takase Kōichirō, who wrote the only full study of his life, thinks that his poverty and low rank may be why he could not study at the Jesuit seminary in Japan, and why he went his own way.
That way led to Rome. He went there of his own will, a Jesuit in Japan complained, and the Jesuits at home were not pleased.By 1610 or 1611 he was a diocesan priest there, ordained in Rome, known in Rome also as Pedro Antonio, and a fine Latin scholar.A Jesuit report of 1649 remembered him as a man of great gifts and sound learning who came to Rome under Paul V, and whom St Robert Bellarmine, the great Jesuit theologian, often invited to his house; the cardinal talked with him at length about the things of the spirit and prayed the Office with him.
He was never a Jesuit. Some older English histories call him one; Takase shows from the Jesuit letters that he was a secular priest, ordained outside the Society's system.
Macau, and an awkward question
He left Rome for home and reached on 7 August 1614.There he met Japanese dōjuku, the lay assistants of the , who wanted to study for the priesthood and had been refused. He urged them to leave the Society and seek ordination as diocesan priests, as he had done.The Jesuits saw him as a danger to church order. Takase reads him more kindly: a Japanese priest who had seen that Japanese could rise to the altar outside the European orders, and who wanted others to have that chance.
He came home on the Portuguese ship in 1615. A Jesuit letter from of 20 March 1616 reports his arrival: "Thomas Araki, that is Pedro Antonio, a Japanese diocesan priest ordained in Rome, came back on this nau."He came home to a Church in danger. In 1614 the Tokugawa had banned the faith and expelled the missionaries.
The gown of the Roman seminary
For four years he worked in Nagasaki as a diocesan priest, and almost nothing of that work is recorded.Then, in August 1619, he was arrested in Nagasaki "for the faith" and taken in chains before the magistrate Hasegawa Gonroku.
What happened next is told in a Jesuit letter of February 1620. One night he escaped from the magistrate's office. Two days later, for reasons the writer did not know, he gave himself up again, wearing the gown of the Roman seminary.Takase sees pride and courage in that gown: Araki was presenting himself as what he was, a Catholic priest made in Rome.
The prison broke him. He was held for about twenty days in a cramped and cruel cell, at the prison where the Jesuit was then also held.He could not bear it. He told the magistrate that he gave up the faith and the priesthood, and asked to be released.Takase dates the apostasy to about September 1619.
The Jesuits did not give him up. The Jesuit Provincial wrote in 1620 that he had tried to find out what had become of "the cleric Pero Antonio", the name Araki had used in Rome, "who apostatized after his return from Rome". He sent a man to the district to ask, and when Fr happened to go there too, asked him to look into it as well.It is a strange line to read now, because Ferreira himself would fall in 1633.In 1620 he was still the priest sent to look for the lost sheep.
Years in the magistrate's service
From then until at least September 1637 he worked for the Nagasaki magistrates.They used what he knew. He told them about Europe and the Church. A Jesuit letter says he told the magistrate that Murayama Tōan, the deputy of Nagasaki, had supported Toyotomi Hideyori at Osaka.He interpreted at the trials of hidden missionaries, at the interrogation of the Franciscan Luis Sotelo, and on board the Portuguese ships when the magistrate searched them for priests and letters.The missionaries came to fear him above most men, because he knew them all.In the summer of 1622, when the authorities gathered the prisoners for the trial of the friars Pedro de Zúñiga and Luis Flores, the man who carried the order to the lord of Hirado was, Profillet writes, "Thomas Araki, the apostate priest".
In later years three fallen priests served the Nagasaki inquisition together. A local history of Nagasaki records that they declared the whole Christian religion false, a mere pretext for conquering foreign lands, and that they proposed that Christians who recanted should sign a written oath; at the foot of each oath the three of them signed as witnesses. They were Chūan, who was Ferreira; Ryōjun, the Japanese priest Miguel ; and Ryōhaku, who, Hubert Cieslik shows, was Thomas Araki.The boy who had gone to Rome with nothing now put his name to other men's denials.
In September 1637 four friars who had tried to enter Japan by way of the Ryukyus were brought to Nagasaki. At the hearing Araki spoke to the Dominican Miguel de Aozaraza in Latin and urged him to give up his faith. Aozaraza answered: "You speak Latin, so you must understand this. You are surely an apostate. You have spoken Latin well, but what you said was very bad."
Return
That might be the whole story. But there are reports, from two quite different directions, that it was not.
The first is Dutch. On 17 November 1646 the head of the Dutch trading post at Nagasaki, Willem Verstegen, wrote in his diary about a Japanese named Thomas, who had lived long in Rome near the pope. He had acknowledged once more that he was a Christian, and had gone and reported it himself. Because of his great age, the diary says, the magistrate held him under guard, and there he fell ill and died. The diarist adds that years earlier Thomas had been hung by his feet for more than a day and a night and had given in, though in his heart he held firm.
The second is Catholic. In a letter of 2 May 1649 from Tonkin, the Jesuit Giovanni Filippo de Marini reported that fourteen Japanese had been martyred in Japan, among them a priest named Tomaso who had been ordained in Rome.The Jesuit annual report for 1649 tells the story at length. In that year, it says, fourteen Christians died for the faith in Japan, and the apostate priest was present at their deaths. As he watched, his heart changed. He began to declare aloud that he was a Christian and a Catholic, that he had lived in error not from ignorance but by his own will, and that he regretted nothing so much as thirty years of serving idols. The soldiers and officials said he had lost his mind. He answered plainly that he was perfectly sane. Brought before the council, he would not be silenced, and asked to be set free among the people so that he could undo all he had said against the faith. Fearing a riot, they sent him back to prison, and there, the report says, he offered himself to sword, pit, cross and fire for the Saviour.
Takase is careful. Both reports are hearsay, written far from Nagasaki, and they do not agree on the details.The return of Thomas Araki is therefore told here as Tradition. But it is a tradition told by the Dutch, who had no reason to flatter the Church, as well as by the Jesuits.
The thread
Thomas Araki is not a saint on any list, and his years of betrayal did real harm. He belongs here because his story is the other side of the martyrs' story, and because the Church never stopped praying for men like him. He walked into the magistrate's office in the gown of Rome; he fell; and, if the reports are true, in old age he walked in again and said he was a Christian. The door he had shut on himself was still open.